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Marketers are holding back their companies' CSR efforts by refusing to talk about them, writes James Murray. The fear of being labeled a greenwasher leads PR teams to avoid talking about environmental issues and robs corporate sustainability drives of momentum. "[T]he marketing department is the last unreconstructed corporate opponent of sustainability," Murray writes.

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There are four barriers that can hold back a company's CSR efforts, write Alex Perera and Samantha Putt del Pino. Problems assessing the value of CSR and its associated costs -- and integrating those valuations into financial discussions -- are among the biggest challenges.

In the 1990s, famine drove North Koreans to cut down nearly all the country's trees, with some eating bark to stay alive. The country is trying to reforest its land, with citizens required to spend a month each year planting trees, but Western scientists say more transparency and openness is needed to spur real environmental change. "Science should be a place of common ground, somewhere where we all talk the same language," says U.S. researcher Margaret Palmer, who recently visited North Korea.

To improve CSR, companies should stage frank discussion sessions and employee-engagement programs in which workers are encouraged to thrash out their differences, writes Kathleen Miller. "The process of engaging with the conflicts rather than suppressing them somewhat paradoxically enables the organization to focus on the 'higher good' and execute sustainable strategies more successfully," she writes.

The nonprofit group B Lab is granting B Corp certifications to companies that meet rigorous environmental and social standards. The aim is to create a single standard, like the Department of Agriculture's organic seal, that allows companies to send a clear signal about their social responsibility. "As more and more people get interested in this, more and more people are claiming that they are green or responsible or sustainable. It's hard to separate the folks that are walking the walk versus those that are just talking a good game," says co-founder Jay Coen Gilbert.